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Matt Paprocki looks into the troubled development of the 2010 Splatterhouse game, Dan Root on How to Animate a Fighting Game, Ahoy on early adventures games and The Secret of Monkey Island, Dia Lacina on the role of motherhood in God of War, Xbox announces adaptive controller, Kingdom Hearts III gameplay and impressions, Chris Bratt leaves Eurogamer to focus on telling interesting stories about games and developers full time, Black Ops 2 multiplayer reveal and confirmation of no single player campaign, Steam Pulling Visual Novels For 'Pornographic Content' Regardless Of Actual Content, Metro Exodus delayed, Overwatch anniversary event begins, Daryl Talks Games on How to Make a Video Game Memorable, new paid and free content for Total War Warhammer 2, ESRB dropping short form ratings for digital games, E3 schedule, and more.

New Kingdom Hearts 3 gameplay! Yesterday, we were among the first people in the entire world to finally play Kingdom Hearts 3 and get some new information on the Kingdom Hearts 3 release date.We played around in Toy Box, the new Toy Story inspired world, and tried out new keyblade transformations, attractions and links, as well as hear from Square Enix and Disney Pixar on the Kingdom Hearts 3 development process.

Here's some brand new gameplay (captured off-screen) of Kingdom Hearts 3's new Toy Story world. We fight in Andy's Room with Woody and Buzz, visit the nearby Galaxy Toy shop, and even get a surprise visit from Wreck-It Ralph! (This was actually captured on Xbox One, we apologize for the incorrect label at the beginning of the video.)

Treyarch revealed at Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's reveal event that the first-person shooter would drastically break from series tradition. We've collected together the five biggest changes that every fan should know about.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is getting a battle royale mode, developer Treyarch said today, following in the footsteps of PUBG and Fortnite with a mode called Blackout. It confirms Kotaku’s report from last month that Activision will be the first major publisher to join the battle royale craze.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 developer Treyarch acknowledged this week that the game will not include a standard single-player story campaign, making it the first mainline entry in the franchise to do so.

In this exclusive Game Informer video, Sony Bend opens up on the full development history of their PlayStation 4 exclusive Days Gone. The video features new gameplay alongside interviews with creative director John Garvin, game director Jeff Ross, and studio director Christopher Reese. Learn more about Days Gone in our exclusive hub

It’s been a little while since we heard from Star Control: Origins, the reboot of the classic space combat series that roamed the wild wastelands of the 1990s. But developers Stardock have released a new trailer that showcases some of the alien races you’ll encounter in your struggle against the menacing Scryve.

Square Enix shared the latest screenshots for Octopath Traveler along with more info on two recently introduced characters with Cyrus the Scholar and Ophilia the Cleric, plus a closer look at its vast and pretty world.

A confession: I love on-rails shooters. At least, I did during the peak of the genre, when Panzer Dragoon, Star Fox 64 and their ilk briefly ruled the roost. There’s just something especially pure and cathartic about them. As such, it’s no surprise that the debut trailer for Omnibion War – a new shooter in this largely forgotten style from Chilean studio Crazy Bullet – caught my eye. It’s even got Itano Circus missiles, objectively the best sort.

The trailer’s blocky animated title graphics and jazzy soundtrack set the stage for Safe House instantly - it’s a game of spies, where instead of doing all the sneaking and peeking, you’re running the base of operations. The safe house, if you will.

The next game from the grand strategy specialists at Paradox Development Studio is Imperator: Rome. Announced today at Paradox Con, the historical strategy title will begin in the early days Rome at 302 BC, covering the development of Rome’s rule all the way through the Roman Empire centuries later.

What if Left 4 Dead but aliens? Earthfall is what, a cooperative multiplayer first-person shooter about four peeps blasting across the Pacific Northwest and through hordes of aliens. It puts a little spin on the monstoblasting with deployable barricades and turrets but yep, mostly just shoot those nasties good. I’ve heard some encouraging things about Earthfall over its thirteen months in early access, and I fancy a look once it launches properly. That’ll come on July 13th, developers Holospark announced today.

A great way to keep yourself excited about the future of video games as a medium is remind yourself it can be an actually vibrant cultural art form, not just an endless deluge of bland big-budgeted products. And here in New York at least you can do that by going to any of the hip smaller indie game showcases that happen frequently throughout the year.

The Steam Workshop for Garry’s Mod—the monolithic physics sandbox that emerged from Half-Life 2—contains 15,974 maps made for all sorts of different game types and purposes. Jazztronauts is its own separate heist game, but it takes place on those maps. Yes, that means it already has nearly 16,000 levels.

Join Guy and Wheels in this Total War: WARHAMMER 2 - Queen & The Crone Head to Head Let's Play.

Total War: Warhammer 2's next update is huge and adds "Dwarf Forging"

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Total War: Warhammer II gets another DLC expansion in two weeks, and the free Resurgent Update will come alongside to bolster the occasion. Creative Assembly have detailed a bit more of what to expect from all those additions, all of which launch at the end of May.

Paradox have far more DLC in store for all their big games, including Crusader Kings II, Hearts of Iron IV, and Europa Universalis IV. Major expansions are in line for all three grand strategy titles, and they’re all due for launch this year.

Donkey Kong, Rabbid Cranky, and Rabbid Peach are the stars in Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle’s ‘Donkey Kong Adventure’ DLC, as shown off by two new trailers for the additional content coming this summer.

Developers of adult-themed visual novels say they’ve received notice from Valve that the two-week deadline for censoring their games is now off, and that Valve will “re-review” the games for content and give the developers specific feedback if they find content violations.

MangaGamer and Sekai Project will bring their visual novels to GOG, with 11 titles currently available and more to come. This comes in the wake of uncertain policies from Valve regarding sexual content on Steam, and MangaGamer specifically cite that recent controversy in their announcement.

Free-to-play hero shooter Paladins has always invited comparisons to Overwatch. There’s a tanky knight character with a deployable shield and a bearded dwarf who builds turrets. While developer Hi-Rez Studios has always denied cloning Blizzard’s game, a mobile port of Paladins lifted artwork from the game, a foul the studio is blaming on a contractor.

Pillars of Eternity 2 director Josh Sawyer has an enviable list of credits to his name, from Icewind Dale to Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and Tyranny. But after two decades in the business, Sawyer said in a blog post that he's going to take a little time off.

Remember We Happy Few, one of the more interesting indies from the Xbox E3 conference a few years ago? Well continue remembering it fondly, because the game has just been refused classification in Australia.

Justin Wong is a legendary fighting game player, and he’s nearly unbeatable when given the chance to use an ultra-defensive character or system mechanic. This part of Wong’s skillset was on full display last weekend during the Canada Cup Master Series tournament in Calgary, where he won the stacked event using Falke, the latest character to join Street Fighter V’s playable roster.

Ubisoft are overhauling the esports side of Rainbow Six Siege. Announced at the Pro League Season Seven finals in Atlantic City, Ubisoft have detailed seval major changes being made to the structure of the Pro League. The core change revolves around shifting the professional side of the game away from a tournament-style event and adapting it to a true league format.

Jian “Uzi” Zi-hao is easily one of the best players in China’s League of Legends championship series, the LPL. But on the international stage, he’s frequently come up just short of the title. With a commanding win in today’s 2018 Midseason Invitationals, Uzi seems to have started his campaign to topple the regional hierarchy of League of Legends.

At Jason “RustyTrombone” Husisian’s first Super Smash Bros. tournament at a hotel in Easton, Pennsylvania, he was focused on out-maneuvering his opponent when a nearby attendee’s smell filled his nostrils. “I get a whiff and I legit start coughing,” Husisian recalled. “It smelled like he worked in a crematorium.”

People Makes Games aims to tell fantastic stories about video games and how they get made. After proving there's an audience for this type of video journalism at Eurogamer, I want to see what happens if I work on it full-time. Join me! It's going to be a lot of fun.

This week I woke up to news feeds announcing a new trailer for Bethesda’s Rage 2, and after watching it, it really got me thinking again about the importance of creating a strong visual identity for your game.

I think a lot of criticism of games as service is fair, yet also somewhat reactionary – a completely normal response to large-scale changes in an industry that thrives on nostalgia and long-held assumptions about what games should be, what they should represent.

For as many polished finished products make their way to market, there are thousands of ideas that never make the cut, or end up so iterated on and mutated by the time they’re finished that they’re unrecognizable from their original form.

In Night in the Woods, you play twenty-year-old Mae Borowski upon moving back to a hometown in decline. Her parents want to know why she just dropped out of college, her friends have all gotten jobs, her dreams keep getting weirder, and she believes there’s a mysterious threat lurking in the woods. NITW has won the BAFTA Game Award for Narrative and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival, among other accolades.

Scott Benson is the co-creator of Night in the Woods. Below, Scott talks with Cartridge editor William Hoffacker about gothic horror, researching town histories, how Twitter helped him write dialogue, and more.

God of War begins with a handprint. A testament to where a woman—a mother—once stood and thought about her child. It’s a marker, we learn, that says “I was here to keep you safe,” as much as it hides “I was here to restrict you.” It’s our first taste of how, in God of War, mothers are interchangeably flat, and come in two varieties: dead or alive. But one thing remains constant—mothers keep secrets.

In fairness, everyone in God of War is keeping some kind of secret. The narrative overemphasizes Kratos’ secret, but it is the secrets mothers keep that form its core.

Kratos’ emotional distance is not new in portrayals of aloof fathers. In fact, Kratos feels completely one-dimensional because of how neatly he fits into those archetypes. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Kratos’ flat design only proves that the story is not about him, but about Atreus.

Kratos, for all the talk about maturity, can’t mature past the toxic masculinity of his past. Even though he can recognize the problem, he only ties it to all the people he’s killed. But with God of War’s issues with a rigid concept of what being a man means, even if Kratos doesn’t pass on the body count, he’ll pass on the exact same mindset.

After becoming the the template for a whole generation of brawlers, God of War isn’t sure what it means to bring a new entry into the modern day. So its answer is to become an unholy amalgam of every action game design trend of the last 15 years. But unable to be satisfied with being an imitator it draws attention to itself. It’s design for the age of CinemaSins: determined to answer every logical inconsistency inherent to games with a knowing joke or a long winded explanation that insists the answers are in the lore.

God of War has always been the game of the generation, a mirror in which we can see ourselves and our values, polished with a spit-shine and shot up to the top of the charts. In 2005, this meant Devil May Cry with the irony sanded off, simple combat and violent spectacle, with some light Zelda puzzles and Jak and Daxter platforming to keep you from getting bored. It took the beloved games of the era and removed their soul, smashing them together into unholy frankenstein that with an almost self-aware cynicism seemed to ask the audience: is this enough? The answer, of course, was yes.

Occasional games like The Last of Us screw around with the traditional setup of those roles, reversing them from time to time, but they rarely go further than this very basic interpretation of what it means to be a parent: being responsible for another person’s survival. They rarely explore the other ways in which parents and children learn from one another, or the damage that parents fear they might inflict.

Make no mistake, Frostpunk is fascist. It is fascist in a boldfaced way, the fascism of survival, the fascism that is “the only good option.” It is refreshing in its honesty. While I enjoyed They Are Billions greatly, it never felt like a game where I could indulge the interiority of the city. You were not concerned with the populace, but the constant war effort, the feverish expansionism.

For the criminally underserved audience of girls and women who love games, it’s one of the few franchises that was actively welcoming us to play since 1998. Amid an unrelenting onslaught of male power fantasies and protagonists, there was always Nancy: a video game hero who gave us the chance to embody our empowerment narratives and wish fulfillment.

To listen to what Sid Meier says about his most famous achievement today, my writing all of these articles on Civilization has been like doing a deep reading of an episode of The Big Bang Theory; there just isn’t a whole lot of there there. Meier claims that the game presents at best a children’s-book view of history, that the only real considerations that went into it were what would be fun and what wouldn’t. I don’t want to criticize him for that stance here, any more than I want to minimize the huge place that fun or the lack thereof really did fill in the decisions that he and his partner Bruce Shelley made about Civilization. I understand why he says what he says: he’s a commercial game designer, not a political pundit, and he has no desire to wade into controversy — and possibly shrink his customer base — by taking public positions on the sorts of fractious topics I’ve been addressing over the course of these articles. If he should need further encouragement to stay well away from those topics, he can find it in the many dogmatic academic critiques of Civilization which accuse it of being little more than triumphalist propaganda. He’d rather spend his time talking about game design, which strikes me as perfectly reasonable.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is a big epic fantasy game about gods, pirates, boats, and ghosts, but what’s stuck with me post-game is how good the maps are. They’re really good, and the navigation is even better.

Bioshock Infinite is without question one of the most critically acclaimed and talked about video games of 2013. It has been praised for a well-crafted storyline, memorable characters, and outstanding gameplay. It has also evoked the most intense feelings of discomfort and disgust I’ve ever felt toward a video game.

What gives a game “good pacing”? How do you make moments in a game “memorable”? When is less information, actually more? These questions are all something that video game developers should be asking, and I would recommend looking to the psychology of primacy and recency for the answers. The human mind has a natural desire to process the stimulation in front of it, and in this episode of Psych of Play, I’ll take a swing at explaining how you can play with levels of color and sound to make your video game memorable.

Tina Nawrocki has spent her entire life learning about traditional, hand-drawn animation. As a student, she often lamented the fact that big sriltudios like Disney no longer require traditional animators, and she wondered if anyone would ever appreciate the unique talents she was developing.

Hey, so our Patreon has been going through a rocky time lately, if you could throw us some support we'd really appreciate it! (http://patreon.com/videogamestorytime)

In 1998, a little known company named Valve released a first-person shooter named Half-Life and changed the face of gaming. Where other shooters struggled to provide even a semblance of a story, Half-Life had brains to match its brawns; a stirring tale featuring a realistic human cast and a protagonist that was more than a hand and a gun unfolded before the player’s eyes as they progressed through each level.

In this excerpt from The Game Informer Show podcast, two of the writers behind Sony Santa Monica's God of War Matt Sophos and Richard Gaubert talk about their journey from Ion Storm, to Lost Planet 3, to writing Kratos and Atreus' journey on the PlayStation 4. The interview contains spoilers in the back half, but we give a clear warning.